Six months ago, as I trudged knee-deep through the apocalyptic, pretentious, preachy, and rarely encouraging content on Twitter, I stumbled across a quote that a poet I follow posted:
"Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one's private language" (Yiyun Li).
At the time, living in the heart of the Midwest, my understanding of the quote was about being able to talk to people who speak the same language as you in a figurative sense--people who are on the same wavelength as you, people you don't always seem to have to explain yourself to, justify yourself to, or qualify yourself to--people who just "get" you.
Since stuffing everything I own into suitcases and resurrecting my life 5,000 miles away from my sleepy Midwest town, that quote has taken on a new shape. There is loneliness in not being able to speak your heart language with another, yes. But there is loneliness in not being able to speak your native language with another, and that is a loneliness I had never known until now.
Sure, I have been to other countries before. I've stood on the red earth of Zambia while words in Tonga pierced through the summer heat. I've been in the streets of Germany while words rushed past my ears as meaningless as the babbling of the ocean. But those trips had always been short, and there had always been an end date when I knew I would be returning to the land of my native tongue.
But this is different.
I live in an apartment that I pay rent for every month. I drive to the grocery store every week. I go to church with the same people, and listen to a sermon in Portuguese every Sunday. This isn't a trip I am taking for a couple weeks, this is my life.
I want to make a small side note before I continue: there have been people I have been able to talk to. I have David and Sarah and their daughters, Evelyn and Anna Clair. Being able to have them, and honestly just hear English being spoken from their lips, has been a lifeboat in times when I felt like I was drowning in the intelligible.
There are a handful of Brazilians here who speak English that I have been able to communicate with, share my heart with, and connect with. I have also been able to start to communicate in Portuguese in slow careful sentences and this has made me feel like I can connect better with the people here as well.
I also have been able to talk to friends and family back home. Being able to see their faces and hear their familiar voice and accents has helped fill me up on days I feel empty.
In spite of this, there are days I can still feel loneliness creeping in.
It comes tapping on my window when I am trying to communicate a word in English that doesn't exist in Portuguese, and I am left offering a cheap imitation of an idea I was trying to express, leaving me feeling like I didn't really say what I wanted to.
It barges into my apartment uninvited when the conversations my Portuguese allows me to engage in never scratch past the surface and I am left feeling like I am not truly communicating with anyone, like I am not saying anything that matters, and like I am not truly knowing or being known by anyone.
I have been learning Portuguese with two separate teachers--one for grammar and one for conversation--for about three or four weeks since I have been here.
I have learned enough to have conversations with people that I imagine are the equivalent of a 15-year-old boy learning to drive his dad's rusty green stick-shift truck in a muddy cornfield.
Here is the most important thing I have learned so far: language is so much more than words.
Language is shared experiences, trends, culture, and slang that have grown and changed and evolved over decades. You can't know all of those things simply by learning how to say, "good morning."
Although, it certainly is a good place to start.
Here's the second most important thing I have learned so far: I don't know how I would learn another language if the Gospel wasn't present in my life and in the lives of those who have received me here.
To learn a language requires so much patience and grace. So. Much. Patience. And. Grace. There have been days I feel my chest tightening in frustration because I have tried four or five times to say something and I am still not able to communicate with the person I am talking to. Those are days I want to scream at them, at myself, at the world.
The simple fact of the Gospel is that we can extend much grace because we know much grace has been extended to us.
And so when a phrase as simple as "what do you mean?" ends in a blank stare, attempts to find another phrase that communicates the same thing, and an eventual "Never mind" I can have grace (and more patience than I currently possess).
When my speaking sounds like the sloppy sentences of a child just learning how to talk, I am thankful for the other believers who have had grace with me.
Finally, here's the third (or maybe this should be first, and this list should be flipped, oops) most important thing I have learned so far: I can think of few other showcases of the unity we find in Christ than when believers from different languages, different cultures, different experiences, and different worldviews can sit at a dining room table and study the Word of God together and connect with each other and be brothers and sisters in Christ because of the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ that made us all ONE.
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| A bible study that has started meeting in my apartment on Friday nights. We had our first study in Hebrews this week. |
Psalm 67 says: "May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us--so that your ways may be known on Earth, your salvation among all nations. May the peoples praise you, God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples with equality and guide the nations of the Earth. May the peoples praise you, God; may all the peoples praise you. The land yields its harvest; God, our God, blesses us. May God bless us still, so that all the ends of the Earth will fear him."
In this verse there is no distinction of ethnicity, language, gender or class. We have been separated and divided because of sin, but this isn't the way we were created to live. We were created to live as one people, all worshipping together.
"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the lamb!'" (Revelation 7:9-10).
This is the long game. This is the end-all-be-all goal of everything missionaries, and evangelists everywhere do every day; that they will one day stand with believers from every corner of this curved planet--that all believers will one day sing God's praises in perfect harmony.
And so when language, cultural and geographical barriers begin to get broken down on this side of Heaven, in the midst of a sin infested land riddled with impatience, biases and stereotypes, I am convinced we get to see a little glimpse of what that final day will be like when there is nothing that separates one believer from the next.
And so, yes, right now it can feel lonely, but I have a funny feeling that once I get through this season of language learning and assimilation to the culture here, my idea of what it means to be known and seen and understood will have a firmer identity in the Gospel and look a little bit more like what Christ intended.
You are loved and you are not alone,
S
